


Copacetic

by Lieutenant_Rusty (TwelfthAdept)



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Extra mild slash, Humor, M/M, Mild Language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-03
Updated: 2019-11-03
Packaged: 2021-01-21 02:43:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21292325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TwelfthAdept/pseuds/Lieutenant_Rusty
Summary: Alternatively, five times Jim Kirk lied to Bones and one time Bones returned the favor.
Relationships: James T. Kirk/Leonard "Bones" McCoy
Comments: 4
Kudos: 98





	Copacetic

It starts in the Academy infirmary. 

Jim’s pretty sure everything’s fine, really - a little rash never hurt anyone - but when parts of him start _oozing_ he figures it probably doesn’t hurt to get it looked at. He makes his way in, ignores the receptionist who gives a panicked yelp and starts frantically mashing buttons where she thinks he can’t see, and is calmly escorted out of the waiting room by an orderly wearing a full-body protective suit that Jim’s sure is complete overkill.

Bones, of course, has an altogether different opinion of the situation, and upon discovering Jim seeping purulently into a biobed his eyebrows practically retreat into his hairline. “Jesus, Jim, what happened?”

“Nothing!” When this fails to convince Bones, or at least lower his eyebrows a centimeter or two, Jim goes on, “Cadet Hglhx - from my diplomacy class, you know, the one with the tentacles? Man, you wouldn’t believe the things she can do with - anyways, she just got a box of rzgldt tea from home and invited me over to share it. And now I’m all purpley.” For emphasis, he hikes up the hem of his shirt, exposing hives the size of baseballs, all pulsing a rather sickly-looking shade of violet-green. It matches the peeling patches on his face. “See?”

Bones only stares at him, caught between his customary ‘don’t be a goddamned idiot’ glare and what looks like it might possibly be existential horror. It’s kind of hard to tell through the face shield.

He’s gonna bust a vein if that keeps up. Jim holds up his hands, where vaguely mauveish pustulence is now leaking out from around his fingernails. “Relax, Bones! It’s okay!”

_That_ gets Bones moving again. He yanks out a scanner, and begins to wave it, frantically, scowling as it beeps cheerfully back at him. It seems to be doing an awful lot of beeping. “Okay? Okay?! Are you _crazy_? That stuff’s toxic to humans in large enough quantities! How much did you drink?”

“Only a couple sips, jeez.”

Bones stop his scans, affronted. “She invited you over for tea and didn’t even give you any?!” 

“The tea wasn’t exactly the point of the thing, Bones.” Jim rolls his eyes. One of them sticks that way. “So, are you gonna fix me?”

“You’re lucky I don’t just _fix_ you and put an end to all this nonsense,” Bones grumbles, dialing up some kind of injection that’s probably gonna sting.

“You wound me, Bones.” Yep, that stings. “Literally. Ah!”

“Don’t be a baby.” Bones sets the hypo down and crosses his arms. The plastic sleeves of his biohazard suit creak ominously. “The swelling should start to go down in a couple minutes, but I want you to-”

Yeah, yeah, he’s heard all that before. Rest, drink plenty of liquids, stop being stupid...Jim hops down off the biobed, noting with satisfaction that his knees don’t feel like they’re bending the wrong way anymore.

“Thanks, Bones! Good as new!” 

He skips away, leaving Bones sputtering in his wake.

* * *

The second time it happens, it’s after he’s woken Bones from a dead sleep.

It’s hard to talk around a swelling lip, but when Bones doesn’t respond to the shaking Jim doesn’t really have a choice. “Bones.”

“Go ‘way,” Bones mumbles, burrowing deeper against his pillow. 

“Booones.”

No luck. Is that _drool_?

“_Bones_!” Bones only swats at him, ineffectually, and blearily tells him just where he can go. It’d be more effective if Jim hadn’t already heard it a million times before. Perks of having a crotchety old man as a roommate, he guesses.

Finally, he hits upon the magic words. “C’mon, Bones, I’m bleeding out, here.” 

Bones’s eyelids crack open, at that, and he gives Jim a befuddled stare. It’s kind of cute, before Bones realizes just what he’s looking at and his face shapes itself into its customary scowl. “What the hell did you do?” 

Jim _would_ answer that, but he’s pretty sure it would only make Bones madder. 

Bones sits up, swings his legs over the side of the bed, and begins groping for his medkit in the dark. When he finds it, the tricorder’s screen is blindingly bright in their tiny dorm room.

Jim winces away from the light. “I’m okay!”

Bones doesn’t look up from the tricorder. “No, you’re not. You’re concussed, contused, intoxicated, lacerated, and really fucking lucky that I’m too tired to report you.”

“Bones—” He wouldn’t report him. Not really. Jim hopes. 

In answer Bones grabs him by the chin and starts waving some other piece of medical equipment at him.“Hold still, goddammit, your face isn’t gonna fix itself.”

Jim tries to say something, and Bones’s grip tightens. Bones presses a button and whatever it is that he’s holding gives off a beam of blue light that half-blinds Jim all over again and makes his skin go tingly. At least, he thinks it’s from the light. 

Now is _really_ not the time to be having those kinds of realizations. 

Bones finally finishes what he’s doing, and clicks the tool back into place with a sigh. “Let me guess, I should see the other guy.”

“Guys. The other guys.”

Bones frowns. “How many?”

“Three.” Bones has picked up his left hand, now, prodding at a finger that Jim hadn’t even noticed was out of place. “ -ah! Watch it!”

“They look like you?”

“Worse.” Jim gives wolfish half-grin that threatens to open up his lip again, and Bones rolls his eyes—but he doesn’t rebuke him. “They jumped me. What was I supposed to do?”

Bones grunts. “Next time, duck.”

* * *

The third time it happens, the Enterprise is limping her way back to Earth after the Narada incident, and Jim is about to limp his way back to whatever makeshift quarters he can find and sleep for the next week—or at least until something else goes wrong—when the sharp pain in the back of his ribcage stops him.

He’s been ignoring it, running on adrenaline for the last ninety-six hours, and now that he finally has nothing else to pay attention to—okay, yeah, it hurts. It’s not much, really, after everything they’ve just been through, but it’s annoying and it _won’t go away_. 

On the one hand, it’s probably nothing.

On the other hand, he might have caught some alien disease and now all his organs are going to fall out and he can just _see_ Bones going ballistic over that.

So, instead of flopping down onto a nice, utilitarian cot and cuddling up with an emergency blanket, Jim does an about-face and flops his way through the sickbay doors instead. He’s not sure whether he should be relieved or exasperated when he finds Bones still there, looking about as tired as Jim feels. 

Bones doesn’t even scowl when he looks up from his workstation, and that’s when Jim knows he must be exhausted. “What’s wrong, Jim?”

Jim slaps a hand over the offending spot and pulls a face. “I think my pancreas hurts.”

Bones shoots him a long-suffering look. “That’s not your pancreas, that’s your kidney.” He pauses, as the rest of it sinks in. “Your kidneys hurt?”

Kidney? That doesn’t seem so bad. Though, from the look Bones is giving him, maybe it is. “Don’t worry,” he says, “It’s okay! I only need one of ‘em anyways, right?”

For some odd reason, Bones doesn’t find that to be a very compelling argument.

Four hours, twenty-two scans, and far too many hypos later, they figure out it’s a reaction to one of the myriad of things that Bones stuck him with earlier. Bones is suspiciously nice to Jim throughout the whole process, at one point even warning him that ‘this may hurt a little’ and although Jim’s half-loopy from lack of sleep it really starts weirding him out.

It could just be exhaustion, but sleep-deprived Bones is usually more grumpy, not less—and with a shock Jim finally realizes he’s feeling _guilty_ about it. 

“It’s okay, Bones,” he says. “You didn’t know.”

“Okay, my ass,” Bones mutters, and sticks him with one last hypo. “This’ll help you sleep.”

Jim’s about to tell him that his ass is more than okay when the drugs kick in, and he doesn’t get the chance.

* * *

The fourth time it happens, Bones threatens to write a dissertation on the obvious ineffectiveness of all of Starfleet’s command protocols. Jim knows he won’t, really, because no one has time for that and anyway Bones has half a dozen other legitimate papers he could write first. 

When a pandemic sweeps through the Phalgon homeworld and they request Federation assistance developing a cure, the Enterprise is tapped to deliver the necessary personnel and supplies. The disease is a nasty one, but after a hard-fought battle and a lot of sleepless nights Bones and the research team manage to come up with a solution, which they distribute worldwide, to the Phalgons’ immense gratitude.

Jim, however, has never been good at leaving well enough alone and spends enough time on the planet’s surface to both _catch_ the damn thing and develop an allergy to the treatment drug. Which, of course, they find out when they dose him with it and his throat closes up. All the way. In front of the Phalgon High Chancellor, because his bad luck wouldn’t be complete without indignity on top of it all. 

Which is how a routine planetary visit ends up with Jim Kirk half-naked on a biobed, veins pumped full of so many different things he’d be surprised if there’s any blood left in there. Still, he’s feeling pretty good, all things considered.

“I’m _okay,_ Bones,” he wheezes, and flashes him what he hopes is a winning smile. “I feel better already.”

“It’s the fluids,” Bones grumbles. “Everyone always feels better after you give ‘em fluids. Doesn’t mean you’re okay.”

Jim tries to say something, but Bones claps a hand to his shoulder and cuts him off.

“Get some rest.”

* * *

The fifth time isn’t his fault, honestly. 

It’s all about diplomacy. The Tarakites _want_ to sign the mining treaty with the Federation, really, they do, but there’s protocol to be observed. They don’t believe in negotiation tables, where comfort begets duplicity. Rather, their preferred deliberation venue is a Tarakite steam bath. The heat, they believe, leads to clear-headedness.

Like an old Earth sauna, if saunas were the same temperature as the surface of the sun.

Spock, the bastard, is immune.

After what feels like _days_ of sweating profusely and talking in circles, the Tarakites finally agree to the treaty. Jim staggers out of the little torture-oven and signs the damned thing right then and there.

His head’s swimming, but it’s been swimming, ever since the ambassador suggested they clear their thoughts. He’s pretty proud of himself, though, because he makes it all the way to the transport site before he stumbles. 

He even makes it most of the way to sickbay before he throws up. 

It’s mostly a blur after that. They cut off his clothes, stick cold packs on his neck and groin, and begin debating the merits of a good old-fashioned icewater bath as they frantically try to rehydrate him.

Jim’s half-dazed and can’t find Bones in all the chaos, but judging from the amount of swearing going on he’s gotta be here somewhere. Might as well make the most of it, Jim figures.

“Hey Bones,” he calls out, to no direction in particular, “Like what you see?” 

He hears Bones’s voice from somewhere above him, peeved. “No. Your core temperature’s way too high and you’re suffering from severe dehydration.”

Aw, that’s no good. Where’s - ah, there’s Bones! Bones doesn’t look happy. Jim frowns. Bones looks better when he’s happy.

“’S okay! ’S _okay,_” he slurs, “‘ey signed th’ treaty…”

“Well that’s just peachy, isn’t it?” Bones glares at the biobed monitors as he adjusts the settings, jabbing the buttons with far more ferocity than he needs to. Jim spies the glimmer of a forcefield above him, and the air around him starts to chill. “And it is _not_ okay. Goddammit, Jim, would it kill you to not get yourself almost killed for once?”

No fair, asking Jim questions like that when his brains are cooking inside his skull. Still, Jim Kirk never backed down from a challenge. Think, Jim.

Well, it’s a yes-or-no question, so either answer has a fifty-fifty chance of being right. Maybe if he gets it right that’ll cheer Bones up again. 

“Yes?” he ventures. Ah, there, how’s that for logical reasoning? And under extenuating circumstances, too. Job well done!

As he passes out, he thinks he hears Bones mutter something about rhetorical questions.

* * *

It takes a civil war before it’s Bones’s turn.

During a routine survey mission, the Enterprise winds up mediating between two warring factions in the Taurean sector, and to everyone’s relief and surprise the negotiations go swimmingly. Or, as swimmingly as can be expected after 50 years of conflict. 

They’re just about to beam back up when it all goes wrong. 

Jim’s just giving the ambassador a farewell handshake when before he can react the ambassador’s attache pulls a weapon and there’s blood everywhere and for the first time in Jim’s life he’s pretty sure most of it is his. 

Shit.

Everything blurs together and he hears cursing from behind him and someone returns fire and then he’s falling, down down down-

-caught, at the last second, in the hands of his first officer - 

-in the sparkle and hum of a transporter-

Just before the world goes black he hears Bones’s too-calm voice telling him, “Hang on, Jim. It’s gonna be okay.”

Fuck.

* * *

Honestly, Jim’s surprised to wake up at all. 

He blinks up at the sickbay ceiling, slowly letting it come into focus—why is it so _bright_ in here, did they get a deal on glossy white duranium or what?—and once he establishes that yes, he is in fact still alive and hey, he’s even still in one piece, as far as he can tell, he turns his head and finds Bones slumped in a chair next to his bed, clad in a pair of ill-fitting surgical scrubs. Dozing. 

Jim tries to sit up and it sets off some kind of alert. The beeping wakes Bones, who looks terrifyingly relieved for a second before the usual glower takes its place. But Jim thinks he gets it, now.

“See Bones?” Jim says, “You were right. ’S all okay…”

“It’s damn well _not_ okay! You were shot multiple times with an unknown energy weapon, it took M’Benga and me fifteen hours to put your dumb ass back together and you’re lucky there wasn’t any permanent damage to your nervous system, probably because you already don’t have a brain in that damn fool head of yours—” 

Jim only gives him a drugged-up grin and reaches out, trying pat his arm. He gets some shoulder, he thinks. He can't really tell. “Love you too, Bones.”

Bones just sighs. “Dammit, Jim.”


End file.
